Global Names developers Dmitry Mozzherin and Richard Pyle were invited to
attend a workshop called “Names in November”, organized by the Catalog of Life
and GBIF and hosted in Leiden. The three-day meeting involved more than twenty
people from key taxonomic and nomenclatural organizations, and focused on
discussing ways that a global information system of taxonomy, including both
names data and accepted species information, could be designed to more
seamlessly interconnect biodiversity data through organism names. Although the
theme of the meeting was certainly not new (many participants in this meeting
had attended similar meetings going back decades discussing essentially the
same idea), the tone of the discussion was refreshing in that it focused
comparatively little on politics and technical details, and instead
concentrated on identifying whether such a shared taxonomic infrastructure was
even possible (given the political, financial, and technical circumstances
currently existing within the main likely partners), and what conditions would
need to be met.

Many of the points that participants agreed on in terms of needs and services
very closely matched the fundamental goals and infrastructure we have developed
(and continue to develop) within the context of Global Names. Now that GN is
much more closely coordinating with the Catalog of Life, GN data indexes and
services will likely play an important role in implementing the shared global
taxonomy resource envisioned during the meeting. Following this meeting, we
have a renewed sense of focus within GN development to finish harmonizing
integration of GNI and GNUB services, and especially to rapidly increase the
effort to bulk-populate GNUB from existing data.